One man's trash (idea)

If it was up to the harbormaster, D dock would have been untethered and left to drift downstream long ago. Class distinctions were firmly delineated in the marina, as in the larger world, and the denizens of D dock were the unwashed masses that the privileged set took up power yachting to avoid. The marina manager had more in common with the working stiffs than the blue blazers but his loyalties followed his ambition.

The layout of the marina had been determined decades before by a committee of dedicated snobs who had gone so far as to compartmentalize the slips according to wealth. The decision was made to assign letter grades to the five main docks, A, B, C, D, and S. The silly rich committee members would be on A dock, of course, upwardly mobile weekend warriors on B. C dock was for poseurs and wannabe's and D was left to the wretched refuse.

S dock was for sailboats exclusively but in the regal opinion of the yacht club, S stood for satisfactory because they paid their bills on time. The fat cats in command were power boaters and the only thing they held in lower esteem than poverty was a wind driven vessel. Sailboats were a nuisance, like a log drifting in the channel, zigzagging back and forth across their righteous petroleum driven path, barely in control of their own progress.

They'd have called it F dock were it not for the fact that one of the snobs owned a sailboat for show.

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S dock looked brand new because the sailors hardly ever showed up. On the rare occasion they visited the marina they didn't dwell around the slip as the power boaters did so there was little in the way of wear and tear on the dock. Most of the sailboats were merely status symbols, objects 'd art, and their skippers barely qualified to captain a dinghy. It seemed a shameful waste that those gorgeous vessels should lay idle for months at a time but the owners could afford other diversions as well.

A walk down D dock was a treacherous affair because the money allotted for marina maintenance dwindled as it passed through the letter grades. A dock was sturdy and kept in meticulous repair, as was B dock with its covered slips and hand railings. Things started to slide a little by the time they got around to C dock, some of the light fixtures were perpetually broken and the painted slip numbers were left faded and peeling. The money always ran out by the time they got to D dock and it was left in abject squalor, the Cabrini Green of the boat basin.

The docks were supported by empty fifty-gallon oil drums, welded shut to insure their buoyancy. When a weld on one of the barrels yielded to corrosion it sank to the bottom, or was sucked down river with the current. The lost barrel would leave a soft spot on the dock that gave way to the pedestrian's weight, something like traversing a floating trampoline. If a barrel went missing on one of the wealthier piers it was replaced within the hour, but the humble D dock was left to nature's inevitable decay. Perhaps one in three of the original floatation barrels remained and half of those were taking on water.

In addition to keeping the dock afloat, the proper allotment of empty drums enforced the linear nature of the pier. In their absence, D dock took on a serpentine quality which, in conjunction with the soft spots, created a bobbing weaving path that would make a circus acrobat edgy. Some poor soul fell in the drink nearly every day off of D dock but the frequent appeals to the marina for maintenance were greeted with crocodile tears and the profitable sale of floating key chains.

I'm slow to criticize the rich folk for allowing the deterioration of our dock because it only brought us closer together. The rest of the marina was inhabited by isolationist pufferfish who rarely commingled and for whom boating was little more than another means to flaunt their wealth. The residents of D dock had to rely on one another for their very survival. We'd fish our unfortunate neighbor out of the river when the sloshing pier gave way, or rush out in a heavy storm to help guide our fellow into a dangerously shifting slip. We became a family, bound by arduous necessity and our genuine respect for the river and each other.

It should come as no surprise that D dock was the soul of the scene. Real people inhabited that pier, with dogs and children and towels drying on a clothesline strung across the poop deck. They drank and partied together with a familial ease that the upper crust found unseemly and distasteful. The rabble seemed to have a genuine affection for one another that the islands of aristocracy over on A dock could never comprehend.

It seemed to us that the fat cats with a more solid footing were missing the boat.

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I actually owe a debt of gratitude to the slumlords who let D dock slip into decay because I parlayed the hardship into a lucrative summer job. Every time somebody took an unintentional plunge off of the wobbly dock, I was paid a couple of bucks to dive in and retrieve whatever they'd been carrying. My services were in constant demand to fetch Weber grill components or car keys or jugs of wine from the riverbed. My greatest success was the challenging recovery of a hapless boater's errant toupee. The tiny globule of fake hair drifted with the current before coming to rest on the bottom and it took me dozens of groping excursions into the murky depths to earn my two-dollar commission.

I was visited with inspiration the day that a woman fell into the drink and was separated from her charm bracelet. It wasn't an expensive bauble but it carried a trinket from each of her children and grandchildren and was, in her estimation, invaluable. Heavy shiny things were child's play next to a drifting hairpiece so her cherished heirloom was recovered in a single dive. She was so delighted when I returned it to her that she forgot to pay me and I was so humbled by the joy she displayed that I never thought to ask.

Diving for jewelry, albeit costume jewelry, put me in the mind of sunken treasure and it occurred to me that the rich people over on A dock must fall in the river from time to time as well. Their docks were sturdier but they were tottering old bluebloods for the most part, entirely capable of falling in the water unaided. It seemed unlikely to me that they'd adorn themselves with ornaments that merely possessed sentimental value. When they took the plunge they'd be giving up high-class booty, pearl earrings, diamond broaches or the keys to the Lotus. They would never think of hiring a river rat to do some scavenging, they'd simply ring up the insurance company or the locksmith.

I bought a diving mask and waterproof flashlight the very next day.

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The guy at the liquor store gave me a twenty bucks apiece for the two crated magnums of French champagne. The sterling silver flatware in the rotted walnut case yielded only forty dollars for scrap because some of the spoons went missing. The jewelry angle was a big disappointment, one necklace, one empty money clip and the braided gold band of a ruined wristwatch.

My failed quest for sunken treasure gave way to the accumulation of fascinating archeological data about how the other half lives. What I saw was the waterlogged evidence of a slash and burn boating class that didn't believe in making the long walk to the dumpster. Beneath the boats on humble D dock I found little more than sand and sunken barrels. The riverbed below the million dollar vessels on A dock was blanketed with trash from stem to stern.

Beneath the top layer of jetsam lay an older stratum and beneath that one another more ancient. Before I reached pure sand I found tin cans, actually made out of tin, that dated from the turn of the century. Not only were these people filthy pigs, they seemed to have been descended from a long line of other filthy pigs.

As luck would have it, their trashy lifestyle was the source of my greatest windfall as a scavenger. The current breed of floating slobs was of little use to me but their great-grandparent's refuse carried substantial antique value. They were fond of Coca-Cola, it seems and the frivolous abandon that accompanied their wealth compelled them to toss the empties over the side. I even found a few bottles that had never been opened and still contained the original contents.